Installation does not recognize cd as source media

[newbieson]

I hope you can help me out here.I put a lot of hours looking for the answers with no luck so far. I tried to install SuSE 7.1 which I downloaded from their ftp site under i386->7.1 and when the booting process (from a floppy) gets to the point of switching to the installation source I get a message " Make sure CD 1 is in the cdrom drive" . When I do alt+F3 I find "... auto2 find _install_medium:696 looking for SuSE CD ..." folowed by ":707 Ok,that didn't work; see if we can activate another storage device.." Is something missing on the cd? what are the files and directories that need to be on the cd?
When I compared the layout of this cd with that of a " working" one of version 7.0
I find that inst-sys in 7.1 is a tar.gz package and in 7.0 is uncompressed. When I try to uncompress the one for 7.1 I get a lot of permissions denied especially about making links ... The package uncompresses fine in the "tmp" directory but when you try to copy it anywhere else you get the same permission denied messages.I checked the permissions for the package under linux and seemed to be fine with read, write and execute.... What's bad about this whole thing is that I'm not sure if I am really dealing with the source of the problem.
I hope you can find the time to give me some answers or point me in the right direction. Any assistance will be appreciated.
null (http://null)nullnull " Make sure CD 1 is in the cdrom drive" "... auto2 find _install_medium:696 looking for SuSE CD ..." folowed by ":707 Ok,that didn't work; see if we can activate another storage device.."

[cookiemonster]

From what I understand suse 7.1 is an evaluation cd that you downloaded. They only put the older ver. available for downloading and an eval copy of the latest. In order to install the latest you will have to go out and buy the latest. sorry

[newbieson]

There is a live evaluation ISO demo that runs from the cd which I tried already. What I understand is that SuSE isn't going to make available an "installable ISO"
on their site.What I tried to do is create my own installation CD. Actually I was able to install it but only using the text mode.
Out of curiosity I want to discover what is missing or what I'm doing wrong to make the installation procedure give me the options it's supposed to. That's where my question stems from : What is it that gets loaded from the cd during the installation booting process right after it's done with the floppy sequence? because when you see the message "looking for infofile..."--which happens to be on the cd -- something is supposed to get loaded at that point and I'm supposed to get the option of text or graphical mode which doesn't happen.Instead I get the message to make sure the cd is in the drive...When I hit OK it switches to text mode and loads a 17200 kb somewhere and proceeds with "manual" installation. So the question is what is it that should be loaded instead of that 17200 kb file which would enable the graphical mode to kick in..
Linux is a learning process for me and this is just another puzzle...I guess my question could be put a different way : (Pre-ISO's) how would you make an installation SuSE cd out of the files and folders posted for that distribution.
Any help is definitely appreciated.